I'm giving KDE a try after many years with fvwm, and I am experiencing an annoyance. There is a disk access about every five seconds even when no applications are running. Is this normal, or is there something that I can turn off somewhere?

You can change it with a "commit=nnn" mount option in /etc/fstab, but of course the longer you make the commit time, the more exposed your fileystem (and data) becomes to a unexpected loss of power or crash.

The kernel document referenced above discouraged attempts to convert ext4 to ext3 in place, so I booted aptosid-live, copied my root partition to another drive, and rebuilt the filesystem with the -U option to get the old UUID back.

I have always used the following to replicate filesystems, and it worked fine this time as well:

Yes, and I have added this to my ext3 options as well, now that I know that the commit parameter is not specific to ext4. I still hear more disk activity than I would like, but I am reaching the conclusion that this drive is just noisier than the one I was using prior to this recent installation. I suspect I won't be happy until I get an SSD for the boot drive.

ikeinthai

Post subject: thanks for litlink! Posted: 30.11.2010, 09:37

Joined: 2010-09-22
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@mz: thanks for poe link. it's always nice to have another good link for the timeless QUALITY free literature available on the interweb.

I noticed the same disk activity when using ext3 or ext4. What I find odd is that the sync continues even with no user input or programs running. It would be nice to have it set a longer sync if there is no other disk or user activity. One benefit of the short sync is it keeps the disk awake (prevents head parking) so that disk access is fast and less wear on the head parking mechanism. If you change the timings keep an eye on the load cycle: